I’ve mentioned quite a few times the spurious calculations offered by Ted Trainer of the Simplicity Institute, purporting to prove that renewable energy can’t sustain a modern lifestyle. But I haven’t looked hard at the other side of the coin; the idea that ‘degrowth’ could provide us with a sustainable, low-tech but still comfortable way of living, based on local self-sufficiency.
Samuel Alexander, also of the Simplicity Institute, has a piece in the Conversation, making this claim. Presumably, unlike energy technology, this is an area where the Institute ought to have some special expertise. Sadly, this does not appear to be the case.
Alexander makes two points of particular interest.
First, he suggests that we (that is, urban dwellers) could meet our food needs through a combination of suburban gardening and trade with nearby farmers. This is illustrated by a picture of a community garden in San Francisco.
Second, he observes that this is not a process that should be sought through top-down measures from government, but rather through ‘bottom-up’ initiatives from individuals and groups.
I’ll deal with the second point first. Rather than putting this discussion in the future tense, why not look at attempts to move in this direction, which have been going on for at least forty years (there was a big movement to Nimbin on the NSW North Coast in the early 1970s, for example). As far as I know, none of these have got anywhere near achieving self-sufficiency in food, let alone fibre for clothing, timber for building and so on. And, as far as I can see, there is less going on in this direction now than there was 40 years ago.
That’s not to say of course, that self-sufficiency is impossible. For thousands of years, the majority of the world’s population lived by subsistence agriculture, and a billion or more still do. The only problems were
(i) It’s a life of miserable, back-breaking work from which people have always fled at the earliest opportunity, even when the alternative was near-starvation in a disease-ridden urban slum or shantytown
(ii) The current world population could not possibly be fed (even on a meat-free diet) with the yields typical of traditional subsistence agriculture
Perhaps the Simplicity Institute is counting on using more modern (but sustainable) technology to achieve high food yields. At one level, this might just be feasible. ‘Organic’ farmers have shown that it’s possible to achieve commercial yields without using pesticides or manufactured fertilisers, though other costs are higher, so that it is necessary to charge a premium price. But this only works on a significant scale if, in other respects, standard energy-intenisve industrial technologies (farm machinery, food processing and so on) are used.
Alexander makes it pretty clear that (as with the Institute’s attacks on renewable energy) this kind of modest tinkering is not what he has in mind. So, let’s take a look at the community garden he uses to illustrate the simpler approach. The photo shows about 20 people and a dozen or so garden beds, each about 1-2 sq m in area.
I’m not much of a gardener, but the total area looks pretty comparable to the backyard patch we had when I was a kid, which certainly didn’t feed our family. Rather than rely on such impressionistic stuff, though, it seems better to look at some proper data. Alexander doesn’t offer any and neither does the Simplicity Institute website, but the Internet has plenty of information.
Typical estimates seem to be that you need somewhere from 100-400 sq m to supply enough vegetables for a single person.
That includes a carbohydrate source such as potatoes, and perhaps fruit, but no meat, eggs, milk, grain or plant protein sources like soybeans.
Taking the most optimistic numbers possible, the garden plots illustrated by Alexander would meet less than half the vegetable needs of one person. This isn’t a remotely serious analysis: it’s more like claiming that a household could supply its own electricity by pedalling a stationary bike.
A more immediate objection relates to the transition path. Suppose that the Simplicity Institute managed to convince everyone that it is necessary to adopt the ‘degrowth’ approach they advocate. This would require a comprehensive restructuring of the entire economy: food production and distribution systems are just one example.
How rapidly could such a transformation be achieved? An obvious answer is to run the tape in reverse. The shift from a largely agricultural economy to our current post-industrial economy took about 200 years in the leading economies, and has nowhere been achieved in less than two generations (say 60 years). It seems reasonably to assume that reversing the process would take just as long, even granting the improbable premise that we started tomorrow[^1]
We don’t have 60 years to spare. If the world economy isn’t thoroughly decarbonized by 2050 (a little over 30 years away), the chance of holding global warming to 2 degrees C will have been lost.
The only chance of decarbonization is an approach that is focused much more narrowly on reducing CO2 emissions, through energy efficiency, renewable energy and a shift away from the most energy-intensive forms of consumption. As has been repeatedly demonstrated, this can be done at very low cost, but we need to move much faster than we are doing.
Those, like Trainer and Alexander, who oppose any effective action to reduce CO2 emissions, while demanding a massively larger agenda reflecting their social and ideological preferences, are effective (and sometimes actual [^2]) allies of the rightwing denialists.
fn1. The UN Climate Change Framework Convention process started more than 20 years ago, and is only now producing any significant (though still inadequate) action. ‘Degrowth’ isn’t a process or even the basis of a movement, it’s just an idea.
fn2. One notable meeting place was Barry Brooks’ Brave New Climate site, where denunciations of renewable energy from Trainer and Peter Lang, a denialist who used to comment here, sit side by side
John Quiggin 
@ZM
Tks for the link. Its also good to see all the comments indicating people are increasingly understanding PV on roofs for domestic power is only part of the solution and it poses serious logistics challenge if the aim is to support business as usual.
However these calculations distract from the fact and benefits from moving away from BAU to a mixed energy supply strategy based on much changing of practice e.g.
– There is no mention of solar thermal hot water systems – but these are now very efficient and all the heat is used in heating water – these is probably as much benefit from these cheaper more modest systems to a typical house as a 2 KW system.
– Much energy is actually wasted e.g.
* via excessively large machinery aka cars and my pet hate 4WDs
* poor insulation still .e.g old style windows
* production of goods with short half lives due to dodgy components – LED bulbs lasting a few hundred hours when they should achieve 50,000
* use of cars when a bike makes more sense if only the roads werent optimised for cars
* poor maintenance of equipment and discarding because of fashion – how often do you need a new kitchen or bathroom made of dodgy material not meant to last.
The point here is we dont need the current level of waste and addressing this good massively slash demand making rooftops a more serious option for total power provision than currently in Oz. And if this can be rationalized carbon based fuels might then still be able to contribute at a small rate equivalent to oceanic sequestration.
Partly achieving such sustainability is about living more simply and sharing along the lines of Ted Trainers dreams – but its also about not being dumb about the value of material and energy. Degrowth is as much about this as wearing hair shirts. The only problem is being ultra efficient and not wasteful could also lead to lots of free time to think and realize what a bunch of cretins the Abbot and co (and sadly many on the left) are.
@rog
I wonder what the EROEI of oil is (even from good fields) when you factor in;
(a) energy costs of manufacturing drilling equipment and ancillaries;
(b) energy costs of prospecting and drilling;
(c) energy costs of tranporting oil and fuel (pipes, ships, trucks including the energy costs of manufacturing these pipes, ships and trucks int he first place);
(d) energy costs of refining , catalytic cracking and so on;
(e) energy costs of building huge oil shipping terminals;
(f) energy costs of fighting and remediating spills, accidents and hyrdocarbon fires.
I have no doubt the above is not an exhaustive list. Solar power has energy costs of manufacture, shipping of components and maintenance. Hydrocarbons have all these costs too.
Solar power has no cost of shipping raw fuel to its generators (sunlight direct comes to the panels). Solar power has a cost of “shipping” or conducting the final power product (electricity via power lines but this is a cheaper and more efficient way (even energetically) of moving energy compared to maritime oil tankers and land petrol road tankers. Sometimes the cost of shipping solar power is just the electrical cables in a house. It’s more or less straight from roof to the house outlets.
My point is, if you include every piece of embodied energy in the chain for solar to get the final EROEI (as you should) then you need to do it for oil too. This is the case because the natural laws of physics do it in reality so we too must model the whole box and dice to be accurate. If you don’t model each process for entire embodied and used energy in the entire chain then you are not comparing apples to apples.
@Hermit
The scientists studing these matters like Mark Diesendorf and the Stanford researchers referenced above by others are of the firm opinion that renewables will be truly renewable. The renewables can be booted up to a point where they run and replicate on their own inputs in energy terms. I accept the views of these PhDs in this field rather than that of uneducatated gainsayers. Not saying you are uneducated but many of the gainsayers are uneducated or are giving an unfounded, unqualified, unquantified opinion outside the area of their expertise. Hall has to be taken more seriously I grant that but has he done studies of the true EROEI of oil and coal for the whole production chain?
@Ikonoclast
See MURPHY, D. J. 2014. The implications of the declining energy return on investment of oil production. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 372.
And all the other carbon fuel articles in this particular issue.
@Ikonoclast
I think my strong suit is real world experience not theories. When some of the 100% renewables advocates say we’ll get ‘green’ thermal plant to backup wind and solar you think it sounds promising. Then they suggest electric trains laden with bales of bay to run that thermal plant. It starts to get silly in my opinion. Perhaps some of the academics you mention should spend more time at whatever is the green equivalent of the coalface.
@Hermit
Real world experience is inchoate without organised observation and scientific method.
Also, to cherry-pick the silliest suggestions is well, just cherry-picking again. Thermal energy storage backup is most likely to take the form of molten salt heat storage. A solar heated hot water tank becomes its own thermal back-up at night. Electric or gas back up of solar hot water in Brisbane is mostly only needed because the solar hot water unit is under-powered, with less collection area comapred to what it could have, so it doesn’t overheat and boil in summer. Back-up energy is thus needed in winter (maybe 20% because the collection area isn’t what it could be). Smarter design (which I am sure will come) will allow full hot water heating in summer and winter at least in a place like Brisbane.
Solar thermal towers can generate power 24/7 due to the temperature differential day and night. I have never seen you acknowledge this fact IIRC. Economics will decide whether say molten salt heat storage tanks or solar updraft towers will become the technology of choice for backup overnight power. Our electricity use patterns are partly driven by the times when people need and use the power and partly driven by pricing to suit so-called baseload (ie. inflexible generators) like coal power stations. Repricing to move demand will have a role to play.
Distributed generation (solar, wind) and other backups (pumped hydro, batteries) will also have a role to play. Amateur suggest electric trains laden with bales of hay or bagasse to run that thermal plant. Meanwhile the professionals and scientists are getting on with a lot of feasible innovations. Having said that, fuels like bagasse have a niche role to play. Plenty of sugar mills get power and steam from bagasse.
Passive design has a role to play. My house needs and uses very little air-conditioning because of good passive design. Stoicism has a role to play too. In a country like Australia you don’t really need heating anywhere except maybe a few alipine or montane areas and Tasmania. A properly insulated house will do the trick plus blankets, thermal underwear and ugg boots.
I have 85 plus relatives who still live independently near Bundadberg without air-con in theior own old-fashioned house that really is of quite good passive design. Their attitude is that only sooks and wimps need air-con and that people need to toughen up again. I agree with them.
@Ikonoclast
I think that the EROEI of fossil fuels will increase as th EROEI of renewables decreases. At present coal miners in eastern Australia are running at a loss and oil producers must be hurting.
Steven Chu http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/may/steven-chu-qanda-051513.html
Interesting comments by Mark Carnegie on last nights The Drum.
@rog
The Prieto and Hall study needs to be treated with some caution, as they used a considerably different methodology and vastly wider system boundaries than most comparable studies. It’s worth noting that the same methodology applied to fossil fuel EROI would yield very low numbers as well. Slight variations on the boundary assumptions have yielded very significant differences in the numbers that pop out of EROI analyses. One conclusion of the Pietro/Hall study might be that the EROI of solar is much lower than was previously thought, but the logical consequence of that conclusion (given the methodology) is that the EROI of all energy sources must be much lower than was previously thought, if Prieto and Hall’s methodology is taken as accurate. That doesn’t really tell you anything useful about whether or not civilisation can ‘survive’ on renewable energy.
@Tim Macknay
I agree and I made pretty much the same point above.
@rog
“I think that the EROEI of fossil fuels will increase as the EROEI of renewables decreases. At present coal miners in eastern Australia are running at a loss and oil producers must be hurting.”- rog.
Um, do you understand that EROEI means Energy Returned On Energy Invested? It’s physics not economics. Admittedly, the economic effect is that low EROEI approximately equals low economic returns (absent subsidies). The EROEI of oil and coal is in long term decline as all easy to access high grade deposits are used up and hard to access, low grade deposits are more and more becoming the necessary stop-gap and go-to resources.
@Ikonoclast
So you did.
I think rog might have got the words ‘increase’ and ‘decreases’ backwards.
Thermal biomass fed by electric rail?
@Ikonoclast
Have a look at BREE’s updated Australian Energy Technology Assessments. On Figure 9 for NSW in 2020 they suggest the levelised cost of solar towers with storage and parabolic trough with storage could be in the range $250-$300 per Mwh. Recent spot prices on the NEM have been under $40. I think solar thermal in NSW might also require a winter gas boost, or maybe even this week in mid October. It’s A) expensive B) not that reliable.
As to aircon and the elderly that could be a drama waiting to unfold. Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and last year Sydney have all nudged 47C in summer. If a hot spell is too widespread or too long the young and fit won’t be able to check on all the seniors in fibro cottages and brick veneers. I know some have aircons but won’t turn them on not for stoicism but fear of bill shock.
@rog
That would be the global war ‘of’ terror, or if you prefer, we have everything to fear of fear.
@Hermit
I’m not sure how renewables become relevant to bill shock in the elderly during heat waves. Pricing during peak usage is relevant to the usual supply/demand factors.
Whether we have 25% renewables or 50% (which over the next two decades is about the likely range) the bidding for power supply will be driven by total demand. The marginal cost of operating wind turbines or solarPV/thermal is very low — much less than peak pricing is now.
I am all for the socially disadvantaged getting good community support — which certainly would include making sure they have residences that are thermally efficient and thus require minimal heating and cooling. It would also involve them having an income that would allow them to use air-con wisely.
EROEI is not a useful context except in some very specialised circumstances. As I pointed out quite a while ago, you can easily work out from the price of polysilicon that the energy embedded in a solar PV module (about 10-20c/watt) isn’t worth worrying about in assessing viability, and the same is true for wind.
@John Quiggin
EROEI calculations reflect the longstanding reign of FHCs. This reflects the relatively trivial embedded energy in the machines and capital needed to harvest the feedstock and convert it into a despatchable form and the importance of the consumables associated with these processes — the input fuels. To use a simple analogy, it you want to fill your half depleted petrol tank with petrol, it makes no sense using up half a tank getting there. The energy used in the depreciation of the other parts of your car are relatively trivial.
Solar panels do require energy inputs of course, but once these costs are born, whether they harvest more or less energy during their effective lifetime doesn’t affect their operating cost. What you really need to know in EROEI terms is how much energy they will harvest, convert and send out during their lifetimes. Over 25 years, a solar panel will send out far more than its energy input cost. So too will a well-placed wind turbine. So too will a coal plant over its 40 years but of course, in this case, the fuel inputs to get the coal to the plant are related to how much coal is burned to produce the coal plant’s deliverable — electricity – So EROEI is germane. I read somewhere that whereas in the 1950s 1 barrel of oil was burned to get 50 barrels, now it’s about 13. I don’t know what it is for coal and gas but I imagine it is falling. That can never happen for wind turbines or solar collectors. So doing EROEI is far less interesting. Wind turbines apparently repay their energy debt in about 3 months. For the next 25 years, they return energy at the energy cost of their maintenance.
Could you qualify that a bit further John?
My impression is that EROEI and related concepts are absolutely central to Ecological Economics generally though the terminology may vary. In many respects its just a variant on Cost Benefit analysis. Its also closely related to life cycle assessment in such thinking.
Its very useful as a measure for showing how nutty / inefficient many energy production schemes are – oil production from tar sands, (non) benefits of nuclear power and cost of mining.
While energy isnt the only consideration in assessing sustainability its looking increasingly like GDP is extremely well matched to total energy use which has all sorts of interesting implications for economic growth.
I agree John, that EROEI is not a useful concept in general. (Full life cycle assessment can be useful though). EROEI seems to appeal to engineers. I don’t know why that is.
The ecological footprint is the other popular concept that is not very useful. Economists quite rightly are criticised for trying to measure everything in dollars, and then ecologists come up with a concept which tries to measure all ecological impact in terms of arable land. It appeals because it is a simple concept, but it covers up a lot of complexity by reducing everything to acres of arable land.
@Newtownian
Newtonian, EROEI is something that only exists on the internet in my experience. I have never seen it used in actual decision making. That normally depends of two different factors: (1) Correctly guessing what your boss wants you to say, and a second factor that has a significant influence is, (2) Money.
Fran that is just simply not true.
When PV was first mass produced in the 1970s and alternative energy enthusiasts first fell in love with panels the central reaction of cynics was to point to precisely the energy generated v. input energy costs (like chemical engineer friends studying on brown coal exploitation grants).
Since then addressing this criticism has been a central obsession of the PV research and production community but it is usually cast in different formats and terminology like ‘payback’ time. LCA of PV is central to it long term acceptance e.g. KALDELLIS, J. K., ZAFIRAKIS, D. & KONDILI, E. 2010. Energy pay-back period analysis of stand-alone photovoltaic systems. Renewable Energy, 35, 1444-1454.
One interesting and unresolved question is the matter of how to properly value panel lifetime which we dont have a full estimate of yet of what that lifetime will be – if you double panel half life you double their real value especially for future generations who often dont get recognised in this debate. But standard economics only poorly recognises this benefit except when it suits them (like ignoring nuclear power station decommissioning costs and long term waste management).
Overall EROEI style analysis is not trivial and potentially may tell us some nasty truths in other fields which are also poorly costed – for example the cost in energy for future generations struggling against the damage we are doing now. Standard economics assigns no value and therein is one of its great failures.
@Ronald Brak
Based on your comment I suggest you start use GoogleScholar and read the primary literature. I mean this in good faith. There is so much out there and it is actually quite readable. As I indicate separately you need to get through the terminology to realize that people are using EROEI without necessarily calling it that.
Life Cycle Assessment may sound broader for example but generally it reduces down to CO2 and energy comparisons and it explicitly looks at embodied energy.
To illustrate how much there is out there if you type ‘Life Cycle Assessment’ into GoogleScholar it will come back with about 100,000 references. And that doesnt count all the grey literature use.
@John Goss
John – In this country that may be the case but in places like Germany where they still make things they take this stuff very seriously. As with Ronald I think you also need to read the primary literature to understand what is happening.
As for ecological footprints not being useful??!! – please read the classic paper on this issue VITOUSEK, P. M., EHRLICH, P. R., EHRLICH, A. H. & MATSON, P. A. 1986. Human appropriation of the products of photosynthesis. BioScience, 368-373. You should be able to get a copy without academic access as with so many such articles.
What this article tells us is just how much of planet earth we have framed as ‘natural resources’ and underpins the whole need for degrowth.
You will notice Paul Ehrlich’s name there which is a useful touchstone. If you consider Limits to Growth IPAT and similar stuff and all the subsequent science to be useless or a product of conspiracy there isnt anything I can say. But if as I hope you are more open I suggest this article is a good start to properly understanding Ecological footprinting. I and practitioner friends would be the first to admit it has limitations …. but like the initial LtG models I have no doubt that its general revelations will stand the test of time.
@John Goss
Certainly, EROEI can be a useful first pass tool for assessing chemical energy sources — oil, coal, gas and of course biofuels.
For example if you are raising corn to produce ethanol to substitute for other liquid or solid FHC fuels then the fact that you need 1unit of these fuels to get back somewhere between 1.3 and 2 units of substitute fuels tells us right away that you aren’t going to make much of a dent in demand by resorting to ethanol from corn. Throw in the use of land, depletion of the top soil and suddenly corn ethanol looks a lot like a new form of mining — this time of agricultural land.
So EROEI does have its uses. As has been pointed out above though, we never subject food to EROEI because we humans don’t care how much energy it takes to produce a calorie within an edible food item. If humans weren’t intrinsically valuable the EROEI calculus would put food production out of business. Even more tragically, a lot of food is wasted between the raising of the crop and consumption. And let’s not discuss what really does amount to ‘food’ anyway. Whole aisles in supermarkets containing nothing but items that have zero or net negative nutritional quality and yet demand enormous energy inputs. Compared with these things, some of which directly harm our health, coal consumption begins to look pretty benign.
😉
Yes, I think EROEI is a concept open to debate whereas cash is the reality.
@Newtownian
Newtonian, I mean this in good faith, but I don’t think the things you suggest I read would be my experience.
There’s lots of critiques of the ecological footprint available that are more eloquent than I could put together eg see one below.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800999001512
I also came across a damning comment by the eccentric ecological economist Richard Tol at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/26/ecological-footprints-a-good-idea-gone-bad/
Richard Tol says:
August 26, 2010 at 8:17 am
‘@Willis
The Ecological Footprint is not a good idea gone bad. It is a bad idea. The basic notion is that there is such a thing as an absolute yardstick for what people care about. Socrates believed in this, and all classical economists from Quesnay and Smith to Ricardo and Marx. The latter three adhered to the labour theory of value, while the former (like Wackernagel) adhered to a land theory of value.
Note that Quesnay’s theory was superceded by Smith’s, which was overturned by Marx’s and, finally, by Jevons, Menger and Walras.
In a way, therefore, Wackernagel’s ecological footprint is a throwback to the 18th century. It’s academic regress. The ecological footprint, if anything, is an indicator of the intelligence of the analyst. (The correlation is negative.)’
Richard Tol’s comment of course reminds us of Keynes’ comment that so often we are captive to the ideas of ‘some defunct economist’.
‘The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back’.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes
(There are some really witty, apposite quotes on this wikiquote page).
There’s another problem with EROEI too. In a system in which all (or very nearly all) energy inputs are FHC, it makes good sense to put an equals sign between energy inputs and pollution. OTOH, if most or even much of the energy input is from non-FHC sources, the EROEI calculus can be misleading.
I was looking at one of those fabulous chloropleth maps a while back and it turned out that one of the most energy-intensive societies in the world was … Iceland. It was coloured in black to make the point. That might have been fair enough for Kuwait, which runs on oil, but it was damned misleading for Iceland which runs its stationary power and its heating on hydro and geothermal.
It matters where the energy inputs come from. If they are in a less despatchable form and get transformed into a more despatchable form (imagine using energy from wind or solar to crack water and produce H2 to use in a fuel cell) then the EROEI calculus would not be germane.
@Fran Barlow
To repeat there is still a need for bloggers here to do some serious background reading – maybe including John though its hard for me to tell. Or maybe get a subscription to Environmental Science and Technology so you can understand this stuff better.
Regarding food and energy see for example the references you can access via http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=%22life+cycle+assessment%22+%22food+miles%22&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5
One example recent ref with 470 ACADEMIC citations is WEBER, C. L. & MATTHEWS, H. S. 2008. Food-miles and the relative climate impacts of food choices in the United States. Environmental Science & Technology, 42, 3508-3513.
It took me 10 seconds to locate that body of information.
Beyond that there is popular stuff like Fred Pearce’s “Where my stuff comes from”
These all illustrate EROEI by another name.
EROEI is just one tool in the giant interelated tool box of environmental accounting which is the primary source of all the pop information above. Its neither trivial nor the last word not finished. Its just a part of environmental science technology and engineering.
Fran at 27. I think you have yourself indicated clearly some of the potential problems with EROEI. I personally don’t care what quantum of energy a person uses in doing activity x, as long as that person fully compensates the rest of society for any damage that activity does to the rest of society and the planet, and if they can’t fully compensate, they shouldn’t be allowed to do it.
Likewise in good faith I think all I’m suggesting is people who havent been exposed professionally read further all these environmental accounting which are out there so it becomes more and more part of their ‘Decision Support’ on life choices like whether and why to have PV or a car or whatever. They arent magic bullets but they are useful and provide surprises. I get the sense a lot of bloggers here arent familiar with this stuff but might be interested.
Personally I also have reservations on many of these accounting tools mainly because of the uncertainty boundaries which are often not well quantified.
Nevertheless they are useful as a means to understand why we seem to be increasingly running Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen’s Race i.e. in quest for happiness we put all this energy and effort into work e.g. to buy and run a car – but at the end of the day when you do look at the accounting you see something akin to madness and masochism which is useful.
One reason for defending EROEI is a fascinating problem it highlights in respect to oil. The worse the payback gets the more perversely we need to invest in more dead end energy and in effect support the fossil fuel companies who dont want to change but just want us to keep buying their stuff.
Much has been written around this trend of increasing wealth without increasing happiness which I think addresses Rog’s throwaway that the only thing that counts at the end of the day is money. The bankruptcy of that in jest observation is nicely captured today by the dreaded St George of Monbiot http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/age-of-loneliness-killing-us.
“There have been several instances in recent months when wind energy has accounted for all, or nearly all, electricity demand in South Australia. Last Tuesday, however, set a new benchmark – the combination of wind energy and rooftop solar provided more than 100 per cent of the state’s electricity needs, for a whole working day between 9.30am and 6pm.”
@John Goss
That sounds like a robust principle but in practice, it’s unlikely that every human could compensate the rest of society for any damage that person does to society or the planet, even with the best of intentions. Feeding, clothing and sheltering inevitably have a footprint, and it’s necessarily an indelible one.
At the very least, some distinction has to be made between usages that are part and parcel of underpinning human well-being (the bottom rungs of the Maslow hierarchy) and activities that are arguably discretionary. Given the very great disparities in wealth between human beings, and the ways in which those disparities arose, you would probably have to settle the burdens of the poor upon the shoulders of the wealthy, this side of the emergence of egalitarian and inclusive societies on a world scale.
@ZM I think you’ll find Tasmania has been 100% renewable in most days for the last 30 years. They still thought it prudent to build an underwater cable that ends at Loy Yang brown coal fired station. At nearly 7 pm AEST I’m going to check on SA is this near realtime site
http://empowerme.org.au/market.html#
Select the state you want. I’m finding for SA on 15/10/14 the renewables portion was 26.9% (not close to 100%) and the CO2 was 620 grams per kwh. Ontario for example averages 47 grams. Must do better.
@Hermit
There seems to be something wrong with your realtime market website, Hermit. In SA at 4am solar was providing about 200MW or 20% of demand. Sunrise is around 6am? Or has SA developed over 200MW of solar-driven energy storage. Maybe I am missing something…
In related news, the rather excitable remarks by the PM and various resources industry spokesbeings relating to coal in recent days are interesting in the light of the fact that the coal industry’s market cap has declined by 60% in the past two years. Apparently this is a global phenomenon. This appears to be a global phenomenon. Robert Murray, CEO of major US coal concern Murray Energy, was recently quoted as saying “We have the absolute destruction of the U.S. coal industry. It’s not coming back. If you think it’s coming back … you’re smoking dope.” Interesting times.
Oops. Bit of repetition there. Apologies.
To summarise the above, if EROEI is less than 1, and if the energy generated is of the same quality as the energy input, you have a problem. That’s arguably true of ethanol generated from corn in the US for example. But this can only happen in the presence of really big subsidies (otherwise, the value of energy output is less than the cost of energy input, and much less than total cost of all inputs).
Back in the day, this kind of criticism was probably applicable to solar PV (then an experimental technology) and maybe also to wind. But it’s long since ceased to be relevant. So, in discussion of renewables other than ethanol, we should just forget about EROEI.
If we had a genuine level playing field in the energy market with no subsidies and all forms of energy paying a reasonable, objectively determined price for negative externalities, then the need for calulating EROEIs would be academic. The market would select the more efficient and less negative externality causing types of energy generation. The best EROIE energy generators would tend to be the most profitable.
I don’t advocate free markets for everything. However stationary energy generation seems to be moving into an era where economies of scale might not apply and natural monopolies might not apply in generation. Micro and macro generators might well compete on a relatively even footing. We are seeing associations of power consumers getting deals. Why not co-operative associations of micro-producers getting deals?
However, distribution still look like a natural monopoly to me, best left in state and federal hands.
@Hermit
Umm, you do realise that Basslink is mainly for export of Tasmanian hydro? Of course, it can go the other way, particularly in droughts, but that’s what grids are for.
To repeat, I think you’ve utterly lost the plot. Feel free to challenge me on either of the following points
(1) There won’t be an operating nuclear power plant in Australia any time before 2030
(2) There won’t be any new coal-fired plants either, and many existing ones will close down
(3) One way or another, we will keep the lights on
If you accept these three points, then, AFAICT, every comment you have ever made here has been pointless. If not, feel free to spell out which is wrong
@John Quiggin
I take your point and agree, with a couple of caveats. It’s probably just me being pedantic or plain wrong.
1. When you consider other input costs to making an energy source other than just energy input costs, it is probably the case that we would find that an EROEI of 2:1 or 3:1 would be needed for a profitable business in practice. This isn’t true for distilling alcohol for human consumption of course but then that is not made and drunk for its energy value but for other properties.
2. The average energy profit ratio of our entire economy is the ratio of energy directed to get more energy to the ratio of energy directed to other net economic work. Ratios of capital applied to each purpose would I think follow suit. So a lower EROEI economy will be directing more capital to securing energy and less to other purposes. Where this is financial capital it is moot whether there is any problem as we currently have a surfeit of financial capital churning in speculation and creating asset inflation. Where it is physical capital I would think it matters. If we employ a greater ratio of physical capital to satisfy raw energy needs and have a lesser ratio of physical capital left to apply to say food and transport needs then this might matter economically speaking. Not saying it would present any insuperable difficulties but I imagine structural economic adjustments and social adjustments might be significant.
Any thoughts?
@ZM
Not bad for an averagely Spring day. It was pretty windy though…
Ah, looks like the incoming CEO of CSIRO, Dr Larry Marshall, is about to shirtfront our political reality; as thrilling as the event may be, whatever the outcome, there have already been damaging cuts to CSIRO’s climate science projects, and to basic maths, stats, and informatics capability, among other areas of significance.
The RET has demonstrated that positive action from a government can result in rapid and significant uptake of renewables, while leaving it to the market to sort out the best technological means of harnessing the raw renewable energy sources available. It is a pretty simple (as far as these things go) and effective scheme. I really hope we don’t abandon it or play silly buggers with it.
It seems that the Abbott bloke, not content with winning an election, wants to rub every perceived enemy’s nose in it, just for kicks.
>>>> ” ‘Organic’ farmers have shown that it’s possible to achieve commercial yields without using pesticides or manufactured fertilisers, though other costs are higher…”
Was told by an ag-science guy that organic only works because the other farmers are keeping the pest populations down. Not sure if true but sounds reasonable.
@John Quiggin
If these predictions are correct it would seem that we are heading for energy poverty since coal provides 64% of our electricity, wind 2.9% and PV 1.5%. Transport which equates with (largely imported) oil use is 40% of our primary energy consumption. Next year east Australian gas doubles in price. I think a few here want to point out these issues are not easily solved.
@Matt
It does, but it’s one of those sweeping generalisations. Certainly, genuinely organic farming is more labour-intensive, mainly because you need to put a lot more effort into maintaining the condition of the soil. Pests and weeds are really a secondary problem.
The other issue is the return on your land. If you’re managing a commercial-scale piece of land, you are going to have to either spend more labour-hours managing it or adopt non-organic methods. Using chemicals saves you a lot of money in labour and typically produces a more merchantable and uniform crop. Organic farms tend to be much smaller, precisely so the farmer can do the work him/herself. It may well be that the organic small-holder gets some cohort protection as a consequence of his/her non-organic neighbours, but in most cases this would not be a decisive benefit.
@Hermit
According to BREE in May 2011, about 36% of Australia’s domestic consumption of energy was in oil, and 34% in coal.
@Matt
That might be true, a bit like the herd immunity effect.
Damn posting in a moving train! Carriage 4232 moved my index finger to submit … Sigh …
Anyhoo … The projected figures for 2012-13 in BREE for electricity were 20% black coal and 11% brown coal, with about 39% in oil and 26% in gas.
You seem to be confusing what we have done with what we might yet do. Since this BREE (of 2012) came out it now seems that we are going to have to struggle to avoid having 20% of our nameplate in renewables. By 2030 with a bit of development in V2G and plug-in electric vehicles, transfer of long haul bulk cargos onto rail, some demand management at peak times we could quite easily have decarbonised 30% of our domestic energy consumption. Those brown coal plants (and some of the older black coal plants) will have been decommissioned by then and some of the gas plants won’t be competitive because better prices overseas will force up the local price here.
I do note though that rather than concede PrQ’s challenges above, you simply retreat to a version of ‘we’ll all be ‘rooned”. Perhaps you should change your nym to Hanrahan.
Politically, no government is going to allow ‘energy poverty’. What they might conceivably do is lead policy changes that at some cost reduce sharply this jurisdiction’s carbon footprint. It might be that a large majority of people eventually come around to the idea of having nuclear power here or by 2025 some new means of relatively cost-efficiently storing and time shifting renewable output at scale arises.
Doubtless though, your commentary will be the same.
You seem to assuming that these percentage are fixed and immovable. In particular, you are assuming that wind and solar cannot grow rapidly. The current growth of renewables worldwide excluding hydro is resulting in a doubling almost every three years. I wonder, when you see a human baby do you say “That could never become an adult, it’s too small.”
I am one those who thinks there are some structural and systemic reasons why our dependence on fossil fuels is not going to be easily solved. However “not easily solved” does not equate to “cannot be solved”. I think the problem can be solved with a lot of the right kind of effort and initiatives.
We will have to transform our society and economy. We will have to become pretty much a fully electrical economy. The large personal automobile might have to go the way of the dodo; certainly the IC engined auto will. We will have to produce the same output per capita with about half the power use but that is eminently feasible considering how much power we waste.
I admit I am not as sanguine as J.Q. who seems to think the economics of the free market with some moderate state direction will easily and automatically drive the transition (if I am not mis-characterising his position). I don’t think it will be easy or automatic. I do think it can be done with effort, austereness and dirigist direction. Note “austereness” is not “economic austerity”.